I find that most of the people who say "raiding is easier" are the ones who just clear LFR and base their opinion off of that. The accessibly to raiding is easier as in, anyone can get into raiding. But when it comes to hardcore raiding, raiding is just as hard, if not, harder than it was pre wrath.

Pre nerf H 25m Ragnaros, yogg 0 light 25m, and 25m H LK are probably some of those most difficult encounters in WoW history. Harder than any Pre wrath boss imo. (inb4 C'thun, it doesn't count since it was bugged to be un killable and after the bug fix, he was killed within hours)

imo, H Blackfuse, H council(From BoT) and H Dark animus (From ToT) while it was current were some pretty fucking insane fights too along with their endbosses (Sinestra, Lei Shen etc)

another big thing that i dont think was mentioned is that addons have made things seem eaiser since you know exactly when the boss is going to do what at any given time. i know people do play with no addons but a lot of people rely heavily on them to do well. take them away and things get a lot more complicated.

"The Horde has committed heinous crimes, Vol'jin. But some among you fought against Garrosh's tyranny. For that, I'm willing to end this bloodshed. But know this : if your Horde fails to uphold honor as Garrosh did, we will end you." - High King Varian Wrynn

Also Majority of the vanilla bosses were just simply overtuned and put out a shitload of damage.

It's like taking a boss with easy mechanics such as normal mode Immersues but tuning him for the 575 item level range just by changing the HP and damage and calling him hard.

Sure, you could call it "hard" but the only hard part would be putting out enough dps and healing through the insane damage. It's not like the mechanics were hard to understand or follow or even execute properly.

"1 in 4 Americans are skeptical on climate change...who gives a shit? That doesn't matter. You don't need other people's opinions on a fact. You may as well have a poll asking: Which number is bigger? 5 or 15? Do Owls exist? Are there hats?"

why do people keep saying that? i don't know what crap guild you were in but in mine, if you didn't perform you got gkicked.

People who didn't play in vanilla say "The only reason they were hard was because you had to bring 40 ppl, and you were carrying half the raid, derp". People always seem to be talking about MC when they refer to vanilla raiding. But they forget about BWL which was a giant step up in difficulty. And AQ which was a huge step up in difficulty.

"1 in 4 Americans are skeptical on climate change...who gives a shit? That doesn't matter. You don't need other people's opinions on a fact. You may as well have a poll asking: Which number is bigger? 5 or 15? Do Owls exist? Are there hats?"

Now it's "Oh wow, look at all the lewtz!". That's why this game is going to keep degrading. Blizz underestimates the value of immersion and putting yourself into an RPG.

"1 in 4 Americans are skeptical on climate change...who gives a shit? That doesn't matter. You don't need other people's opinions on a fact. You may as well have a poll asking: Which number is bigger? 5 or 15? Do Owls exist? Are there hats?"

What made old wow raiding harder was that there was a lot more personal responsiblity in raids. Almost every single fight had mechanics that penalized the whole raid if you screwed up, not just you. Now its much, much easier to hide bad players and have the responsibility on just a handful of good players.

Examples? Because I played then. I really cannot think of any examples. Nothing Like Feng's and the explosive wipe in third phase.

MC ... bomb on Geddon? maybe? killed 1-2 people if you didnt move. Tranq was probably one of these, Huntards got their name from being bad at this. Still you could mitigate the damage until they stopped being dumb. BWL... Im not really coming up with anything here. No single person wiped a raid, it was always collective dumb that caused a wipe. AQ? Lots of dont move you die, (aka stand in fire) but nothing wipeable, Maybe Cthun? again lots of people standing too close = wipe. 1 person standing near somone = that second person is angry, first person lols. Naxx? Again lots of ways to die, nothing that wipes a raid by one persons mistake.

Im sorry All of Vanilla ... I can think of nothing that a single person could do to wipe an entire raid. Maybe you can remember something Im missing.

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Ok I remember one... Onyxia. Stand in the wrong spot you pulled 500000 whelps. There is one example in all of Vanilla.

We think we climb so high, Upon the backs we've condemned ...We face our Conϛequence.

2) Gear was quite terrible and extremely rare.
Vanilla was by far the worse culprit of this. In Molton Core, a 40man raid, bosses dropped 2 items and 50% of the time it was gear you didn't even want and was DEed. Items had str and spirit or agility and spirit. They also used ilvl resources on +5 to frost resist and other random stats you never needed. Gear was so poorly itemized it took forever to gear up a 40m raid. TBC improved on this but gear was still very hard to come by and bosses still dropped not enough loot for 25m, I believe it was still 2 drops for 25m (+2 tier items).

Things I remember..

Being the last hunter needing DragonStalker Chest and Boots. Was late for raid and got reemed out by my GM..cause Lincoln Tunnel has traffic..WHO KNEW! Get to the orb and they pull Broodlord...DS boot drop...goes to alt. First time in a month and half they dropped..wouldn't drop again for 2 more weeks.

It was kinda like doing LFR SoO and only coming out of there with barely enough gold to repairs and some motes of uselessness form bags of "you didn't win anything but here's something for your troubles cause everyone wins!"

nice statistics, now please factor in that not all 7m are even TRYING nor care about clearing heroic mode, or aren't even level 90, or maybe don't raid at all.

but to voice my own opinion as a heroic raider the first 11 are a joke, ToT felt much harder than SoO.

Even if 10% of that total population is raiding normals->heroics, multiplying all those percentages by 10 still leaves very few part of the raiding community managing to get there. The first 11 might be a joke to you (they were to me as well) but not all people are of the same skill and besides the 3 last are hard enough to make up for it. It's not like ToT had a lot of hard fights either, Dark Animus, Durumu (-ish), Iron Qon (-ish) and Lei Shen.

but to voice my own opinion as a heroic raider the first 11 are a joke, ToT felt much harder than SoO.

Well congratulations then. You are in the very tiny minority of players who are so good at this game that heroic SoO is too easy. I imagine if you could go back and do vanilla raids with your raid group all as 60s, you'd find those easy too.

The point is that a very tiny percentage of the WoW population would benefit from harder raids than SoO heroic. It doesn't matter how many of the players have even tried. Is Blizzard making a harder endgame exclusively for 8100 people really worth the cost?

Well congratulations then. You are in the very tiny minority of players who are so good at this game that heroic SoO is too easy. I imagine if you could go back and do vanilla raids with your raid group all as 60s, you'd find those easy too.

of course we would, vanilla has virtually no tactics but thats why the game evolves to keep it suited to the playerbase.

and about the endgame you realise LFR and heroic all use the same models, and mostly the same abilities, just heroic generally has a couple of extra mechanics and changes and is far more unforgiving on the dps requirements and moving out of fire etc, i'd hardly say they are spending months of time just trying to tune heroic mode.

Im here writing this out of sickness, my eyes are bleeding thanks to the quantity of ppl saying "raiding is easy" "the game is easy" "wow was better in vanilla".

Lets start saying that I've been playing WoW for several hours everyday since 2004. I experienced every content in the game to the fullest, every difficulty, size, type, EVERYTHING.

I personally am the kind of player that does everything in the game, even the stuff that nobody cares about like finishing the game to 100%, even completing the last quest.

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The important part of this topic:

People have been saying raiding is easier lately, its not and I will explain why its not and why it feels easier.

Many years ago players werent experienced enough, the game was new, everything was a little bit new for all of us except for the small bunch of players that came from another MMO, and eventhough it was new for them also.

If you take a dedicated look into every single boss fight from Vanilla to WOTLK (instead of going to forums to say exactly the same everybody else says) you will find out the following:

1) Bosses have less quantity of mechanics.
2) The mechanics are pretty basic, based on a game that was way more basic (we are talking about many years ago).
3) Performing such mechanics didnt require as much coordination, in general.

What really was "harder" "annoying" and such was the PREPARATION TO RAID, Yes, preparation. Why? Well simple enough:

1) In vanilla many raids required resistance gear that came from long farming and crafting.
2) No gold inflation with prices for said resistance gear been high.
3) Attunements, many raids required a quest chain for you to be able to JOIN that raid.
4) Crafting geared "required" by many guilds.
5) Consumables required some farming time.
6) Most of guilds wouldnt take you without blue set gear (back in Vanilla and also happened in BC a bit too)
7) To farm such gear you needed a lot of time and doing dungeons without a "queue" button, it ment that you had to fly to the dungeon after getting a group that might have had a person leaving in the middle of the run which meant you needed to find someone else, fly to a city, spam trade chat, etc.

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I hope you all see what I am talking about even when my english is pretty bad, raiding itself WAS NOT harder, the preparation was harder.

And for the PVP side of the game we can say that Arenas brought the real "skill based" pvp gaming eventhought some comps were/are better or OP. PvP requires skill maybe.

In my opinion more skill than PvE, PvE is about awareness, knowing your class and "fight studying" for progression plus improvising on specific situations.

Thanks for reading.

Sorry for bad english.

You are claiming raiding was not harder in vanilla, but was just more inconvenient. That is not true. Now raiding equals LFR and that is the easiest raiding that has ever existed in WoW, easier than vanilla, TBC, WotLK.

Convenience/inconvenience aspect aside, raiding is still much easier than in vanilla.